Machine Replication using a CD-R?

dfn_doe asks: "Is there an easy way to replicate a very large Linux install across multiple machines using a CDR as the transfer medium?? I have 9 boxes that need to have about 9 gigs of Web, Database, and other information spread across two drives and 10 partitions and I REALY don't want to do it manually. Any utilities? Any suggestions? In case anyone is interested this is for serving a large distributed database to a secure Web Server." Using a CDR? That's odd, if you have a newtork, you should be using that to automate installation as opposed to burning loads of CDs (not to mention the installation). What do you all think?

Machine replication over a network

[gavinhall]

Posted by einhirn:

Hi!
Work on NETPIPE is in process. It's a tool a friend of mine works on. It uses UDP broadcasts to
distribute data piped into the Server to all of the clients, which pipes the data out again.

bye

I released a GPL package that will ghost drives

[killbill]

I wrote a package (backburner, see www.freshmeat.net) that allows just this sort of thing. You will still need to use dd (and gzip if you wish), but it will do drive image backups (using dd) or filesystem backups (using tar) and allows gzip or bzip to be used as well.

They are a small and simple stream based set of perl scripts. Documentation includes both backup and restore scenarios for just about anything you want to do.

There are 50 to 100 people using this now, and most are having pretty good success.

Sorry I did not see you post sooner, hopefully you are still following the thread.

Replication using CD R

[Mikal]

Surely you would be better off using a product like Ghost to make a disc image and then dumping that image onto the new disks?

This could be done over the network. Ghost runs on DOS though.

Don't forget dd!

[PeterD]

Some friends of mine recently set up a Beowulf cluster, and they had to replicate what was on a number of machines. After not having much success with Ghost, they ended up using dd.

I guess this would mean you would have to physically mount each disk inside a machine one by one, but provided there is a small number of machines, this should be ok.

Having said all this, the ghost (or even cdr) may work great for you ;)

Good luck!

Interested in that sort of replication myself...

[daveman_1]

I have often thought that CD-Rs could produce an efficient and cheap backup medium for say, a "perfect system install". If you figure out how to do this, let me know...